how, even so early as Webster's time, the intransigent Loyalists of what Scheie de Vere calls "Boston and the Boston dependencies" imitated the latest English fashions in pronunciation, and how this imitation continues to our own day. New York is but little behind, and with the affectation of what is regarded as English pronunciation there goes a constant borrowing of new English words and phrases, particularly of the sort currently heard in the West End of London. The small stores in the vicinity of Fifth avenue, for some years past, have all been turning themselves into shops. Shoes for the persons who shop in that region are no longer shoes, but boots, and they are sold by bootmakers in bootshops. One encounters, too, in Fifth avenue and the streets adjacent, a multitude of gift-shops, tea-shops, haberdashery-shops, book-shops, luggage-shops, hat-shops and print-shops. Every apartment-house in New York has a trades-men's entrance. To Let signs have become almost as common, at least in the East, as For Rent signs. Railway has begun to displace railroad.[1] Charwoman has been adopted all over the country, and we have begun to forget our native modification of char, to wit, chore. Long ago drawing-room was borrowed by the haut ton to take the place of parlor, and hired girls began to be maids. Whip for driver, stick for cane, top-hat for high-hat, and to tub for to bathe came in long ago, and guard has been making a struggle against conductor in New York for years. In August, 1917, signs appeared in the New York surface cars in which the conductors were referred to as guards; all of them are guards on the elevated lines and in the subways save the forward men, who remain conductors officially. In Charles street in Baltimore, some time ago, the proprietor of a fash-
- ↑ Evacustes A. Phipson, an Englishman, says in Dialect Notes, vol. i, p. 432, that railway "appears to be a concession to Anglomania."
novelist, Roof by name, dispatched a letter to the Times, denouncing this hick as "middle class" slang from the West, hinting that such barbarisms were deliberately given circulation by "the German-speaking Jewish population of New York," assuring the editor that her own ancestors "came to America in 1620," and offering him a pledge that she would never cease to "adhere to the King's English." This letter, which appeared in the Times on July 14, was quoted with approbation by the Christian Science Monitor, the organ of New England Kultur, on Aug. 14. But already on July 21 the Times had printed a letter from William Archer showing that hick was actually perfectly sound English, and that it could be found in Steele's comedy, "The Funeral." Two weeks later, a Norwegian philologist, S. N. Baral, followed with a letter showing that hick was connected with the Anglo-Saxon haeg, indicating a menial or lout, and that it had cognates in all the ancient Teutonic languages, and even in Sanskrit!
